Community Funds Down Under Tackle Issues Facing Rural Areas

Australia’s Wilsons Promontory National Park is something to behold.

A natural icon set amid the expanse of the state of Victoria, it attracts well-heeled tourists by the thousands each year to swim in the reserve’s crystalline waters and to explore its sun-scorched terrain. But in recent months, visitors have included troubled teenage girls participating in a program run by the Geelong Community Foundation.

The setting, about an hour’s drive east of the state’s only major city, Melbourne, is hushed, like much of this largely uninhabited country. Australia’s population of some 19 million people approximates that of metropolitan New York City, but is scattered across a continent larger than the contiguous United States.

In remote places like Geelong, a provincial Victorian township near the the national park, young girls often spend their spare time shooting pool with their boyfriends or else lolling outside a local shopping center. But today, as part of a 15-week program, their lives are being nudged in another direction.

In addition to a five-day trek through the national park, they participate in workshops dealing with such issues as self-esteem, women’s health, and substance abuse. The girls have been out surfing, rock climbing, riding horses — activities chosen to increase their personal motivation as well as putting them in touch with older people who might become the kinds of positive role models some of these young women are thought to need.

“The idea of this initiative is to inspire these kids — many of whom, without putting too fine a point on it, have lacked in some respects when it comes to positive challenges in their lives thus far,” says Andrew Lawson, director of the Geelong Community Foundation. Other programs started by his foundation in recent months include creating a homework center for disadvantaged young people to use for their studies and building a small mechanical workshop to teach general maintenance skills to youngsters at risk of flunking out of school.

The Geelong foundation, which opened its doors in December with the help of a $1-million founding grant from a local donor, Kenneth N. Stott, is not only a valuable philanthropic organization in its own right but is part of a burgeoning movement.

Fastest-Growing Type of Philanthropy

Community foundations, which with a couple of exceptions did not exist in Australia until the late 1990s, now constitute the fastest growing sphere of philanthropy in the country, according to Ruth Jones, general manager of Philanthropy Australia, the national association of grant makers.

Her organization has been focusing on developing community funds, especially in rural Australia. That part of the country, from where many of the country’s most enduring cultural myths are drawn, is also “in a state of social crisis right now,” explains Ms. Jones. The quiet heartland is emptying out. Increased urbanization, economic changes, and globalization have led to wholesale closure of factories and schools, and produced, she says, “a crying need for new strategies by which hard-hit communities can somehow begin to regenerate themselves.”

It was to help this process that the country’s federal government recently lent its support to the nascent movement to create community foundations. The community-foundation model — independent charitable organizations formed to collect and distribute gifts from donors to meet needs in specific geographic areas — arrived in Australia largely by way of the United States. But in Australia, community funds work with more explicit endorsements from the government than do those in the United States.

Two years ago, the Australian government announced its support for the creation of the Foundation for Rural and Regional Renewal, an organization charged with helping far-flung communities nationwide find their economic and social feet in the 21st century.

The foundation was formally established 18 months ago with $500,000 from the Sidney Myer Fund, in Melbourne. It operates in partnership with corporate donors as well as the state and federal government in its work.

“We’re still at a very embryonic point in our development,” admits Sylvia Admans, chief executive of the Foundation for Rural and Regional Renewal, who estimates that somewhere between $15-million and $25-million currently exists for community-foundation projects in Australia. Ms. Admans and two other employees work out of a newly opened office in Bendigo, a Victorian town of 86,000 inhabitants. To date, the group has awarded grants to seven developing community foundations in Victoria, New South Wales, and Tasmania, along with study grants to six other emerging foundations scattered around the country.

The Foundation for Rural and Regional Renewal has also supported projects to spur community and economic development, provide services to young people, and encourage organic farming, indigenous cultural education, rural tourism, and sports activities.

To get ideas about how to develop community foundations, the foundation has also earmarked money to allow a steady stream of North American consultants to travel to Australia and advise community funds on how they can best plan for growth and raise public awareness about their work. And Australians are able to visit the United States to share lessons about what has worked with peers in the United States

Not every one of Australia’s 20 or so community foundations is newly minted. Although the Melbourne Community Foundation became Australia’s first independent fund only four years ago, its previous incarnation, as the Victorian Community Foundation, dated back to 1983, making it the oldest such organization in the country. As the Victorian Community Foundation, it was managed by a profit-making trust company. “I was always a little bit surprised, quite frankly, that it took so long for community foundations to capture the Australian imagination,” says Haydon Raismith, the chairman at Melbourne.

Still, says Mr. Raismith, many obstacles remain if community funds are to achieve their potential. He says the recent surge of activity is too top-heavy when it comes to the sometimes “patronizing” involvement of business leaders and politicians.

“You sometimes get the feeling,” he says evenly, “that this is about the great business and government leaders coming in to teach the community sector how it can best operate.” Such attitudes “worry us,” says Mr. Raismith. “They may have had a ‘road to Damascus’ experience recently, but some of us have been around the sector for a bit longer.”

Mr. Raismith, like many of his colleagues, say their most persistent challenge remains the issue of raising money — and social awareness.

Mr. Lawson of Geelong Community Foundation agrees, but right now he’s overwhelmed with the excitement caused by the projects supported by his foundation. Some of the participants in the program for troubled young women, he says, later told him that it had been a rare opportunity to make new friends, to be a part of something positive, to think anew about life. “This,” he says, “is what the work of an Australian community foundation is all about.”